Shallow Saints

There is a certain smugness that comes along with your husband leaving for a three-week European music tour.

The kind of smugness that results from countless “You’re a saint” and “I don’t know how you do its” thrown your way. You shrug them off demurely with a lot of “Oh, it’s nothings,” but what you really want to say is, “You’re damn right I’m an effing saint. Especially if a requirement of canonization is drinking half a bottle of wine before your children’s bedtime.”

But you don’t say that. And not just because saints don’t swear and only drink in moderation (cue St. Francis telling me to “speak for myself”)*. It’s because you want a piece of the glory. And as a wife and mother, these days, your only glory comes in the form of feeling superior to those around you (or is that just the form it takes when you’re shallow and superficial?).

Your husband is living the enviable life of a rock star, so where does that leave you? When your identity is one of wife and mother, you better be the best damn one in town, and that means slapping on a happy face and “no big dealing” your way through the praise on a rare night out.

My husband gets to eat, drink, and be merry in various European cities. Each of his nights will end with a crowd applauding him, buying him drinks, and perhaps asking for autographs. Simultaneously, I will be cooking, cleaning, and attempting to finish kindergarten homework without tears (mine) in a most assuredly less alluring small U.S. city. Each of my nights will end with a three- and five-year-old disparaging me for picking out the wrong pajamas, and then refusing to go potty so that, perhaps, I may later change those awful pajamas and their sheets when they’re soaked in pee. So, if I bask a little too long in the “I wish my wife was as cool as yous” a little too long, then so be it. Consider it my cut of the tour profits.* Pure creative license. I’m sure that St. Francis was, by all accounts, a real teetotaler.